Writer's Brain

Air. Food. Water. Sex. A notebook, pen, pencil or word processor. All are fundamentals of (my) existence. If I don't have a pen or paper on hand, my brain gets bogged down with words and I get lost staring out windows while writing stories in my mind.

And it never really stops. At two in the morning, when sleep won't come - I'll lay awake thinking of a character - what does she look like when she's bending down to put on her shoes. Do the cuffs of her pants rest on the tops of her shoes, or is she wearing a skirt, and if so, nylons? If so, do they crinkle at the creases of the bend at her knee, or do they sag at her bony ankles? Why is she putting shoes on? What's the weather like? Who is she going out with? This will continue until my brain finally exhausts itself and I'll wake up the next day with only shadowy recollections of the 'writing' that my mind worked on in the early hours of the morning. It's almost like a disease -writer's brain

There are situations and places that trigger an extraordinary amount of writers-brain activity...cafes, for example. Or walks or car rides. Yesterday, on a brief ride to the gym, I found myself studying the edges of the road where the pavement met the snow and imagining fictional characters lugging fictional sacks on their backs, wearing shiny wet black boots and trudging along the roads edge - their breath misting ahead of them then vanishing. The ride was over too quickly for the characters to have faces or names or purposes for their journey - but the descriptions were vivid and lush and I was left kicking myself for not bringing a notebook with me to scratch down my thoughts. (But what normal person brings a notebook to the gym?)

You seem down, are you ok? The silence was worrying my mother, who was driving - she meant well, but her question only aggravated me. Can's she see that I'm working? I forget sometimes that not everyone has a non-stop world of adjectives and plot twists spinning in his or her thoughts.

When I write, I don't sit down with tidy little plans to carefully construct a story. Most days, when I find a moment to attack the blank page, it's more like purging. I spill every description, occasion, setting, phrase out of my head - everything splatters onto a blank word document and then I hope to God that I can clean up the mess.


Thus, the bits and pieces of random characters and stories that I have lying about on my desktop - disembodied and waiting for me to write down their next action, expression, thought...

Unfortunately lately, there has been a whole lot of time for messes - but very little time for the clean up.